Style Sheets

Style sheets are an important part of using a program such as QuarkXPress - and when understood, will help with other packages that use style sheets such as Dreamweaver's CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

imagine completing an entire DTP project such as a book or magazine and then you (or your client) decides to alter the font/size/color of all the body text/subheads/headlines etc? You could spend an awful lot of time highlighting the relevant parts of the work individually and laboriously altering your work. Or you could use Style Sheets.

A style sheet is a set of paragraph or character formatting specifications that can be applied to highlighted text via a user-assigned keyboard shortcut or by clicking the style sheet name within the Style Sheet palette.
If a style sheet is modified, all paragraphs or text blocks to which it was previously appliedwill reformat instantly.
A document can contain up to 1000 stle sheets.

What's the difference?

A character style sheet contains only character attributes; font, type style, point size, color, shade etc. A character style sheet can be applied to one or more characters.

A paragraph ¶ style sheet, on the other hand, contains paragraph formats, tabs, rules. It derives its character attributes from the character style sheet thats currently associated with it.
A paragraph style sheet can only be applied to entire paragraphs.

When commencing a new document (or Project as QXP calls them), a Normal style sheet is automatically applied to new text boxes. You can modify the Normal Style Sheet values.

1. Go to EDIT...Style Sheets. The dialog box to the right will appear. In this case, only the Normal styles for both paragraph and character are given, which can be seen in the scroll-box lower down this box (Alignment: Left; etc)

2. To create a new style sheet, click on the New button and choose either Paragraph or Character from the drop-down box.

3. For text, you would choose the Character option, and the Edit Character Style Sheet box will appear as to the right.

Specify a name for the Style Sheet (here we've chosen Body text) You can ignore the keyboard equivalent field as this is mainly for people using QXP day in and day out.

4. Within this box you can amend every aspect of your body type (in this instance) - font, color, shade (of colour) etc. etc.
If you wanted, for example, all your text to be in italic you would check the "Italic" box.

The track amount relates to how close each character will be to each other.

5. Now click OK and you will be returned to the Edit Character Style Sheet dialog box . Click OK again and, with the style sheet still selected choose NEW...Paragraph. Here you can alter all aspects of the paragraph formatting via the four tabs within this box - General/Formats/Tabs/Rules.

To the right, we have selected the Formats tab. Here you can decide how you want your paragraphs to look by choosing a first line indent which will obviously only affect the first line of each paragraph. Also you can have left- or right-indent which will dictate how wide or thin paragraphs are.

Choose the vertical spacing of each line of text by changing the Leading from auto.
Similarly, changing the Space Before and Space After boxes will automatically adjust how your paragraphs appear on screen. Click OK when you are happy with your choices (you can always edit the sheet afterwards).
You will be returned to theEdit Paragraph Style Sheet dialog box. Now click the Rules tab.

6. Applying Style sheets

When you've applied all your styles to, for example Headlines, sub-heads, body text etc. press the Save button in the Style Sheets dialog box.

Next, make sure the Style Sheets palette is visible at the right-side of your screen (WINDOW...Style Sheets or press F11).

Note the scroll bar that will probably be visible to the right of this box.

Now simply highlight the text that you wish to format and, in the Style Sheets palette, click on the appropriate Style Sheet.